Background Music : Accompanist Howard Wells Actually Loves to Labor in Obscurity

It is said that once after the Griller string quartet played in London, a woman went backstage and asked if she could look at the second violin. “I’ve never seen one,” she said.

Such ignorance still accompanies accompanists. “What do you really do?” a woman asked accompanist Howard Wells after a violin recital.

“It is the contumelious attitude towards the accompanist’s art that matters,” writes world-famous accompanist Gerald Moore in his autobiography, “Am I Too Loud?”

“I never felt second rate,” Wells says. “I always feel that I am collaborating in producing a musical experience. I enjoy being with other artists, making music rather than being a big cheese all the time. Once or twice, I’ve met up with a real horse’s tail who I never wanted to see again.”

Wells has been the big cheese often enough, as a soloist with the San Diego Symphony, playing under the direction of Arthur Fiedler and Andre Kostalanetz. “But I prefer the chamber feeling,” he says. “It’s a sharing.” Wells has played with the Griller Quartet, accompanied singers Elizabeth Schwartzkopf, Roberta Peters, the late Jan Peerce and Nikolai Gedda, among others, and worked with Lotte Lehman, accompanying her students.

Early on, Wells was infused with the art of accompanying. His cousin, well-known baritoneRichard Bonelli “treated me like an adult. He was so generous with his time.” Wells grew up accompanying Bonelli and his students. “That led me into chamber music.” After three years with the Navy in World War II, Wells toured with Joseph Schuster in Europe--”I seem to specialize in cellists”--subsequently playing with cellists Pierre Fournier, George Neikrug, Douglas Davis and others. He was an assistant to Dr. Jan Popper, head of the opera department at UC Berkeley and UCLA, and later became coach and assistant conductor of the Metropolian Opera National Company. He has composed an opera and written art songs), a mass and humorous songs based on music for selections from Hilaire Belloc’s “Cautionary Verses for Children.”

Moore writes (in an earlier book, “The Unashamed Accompanist”) a little acerbically: “It is essential that the accompanist should know what is in the singer’s mind, if the singer has one.” The words of the song in any language should be as familiar to the pianist as to the singer, Moore says. He must discover the literal meaning to play with understanding. Moore exhorts the pianist to “forget his fingers” and sing the words himself to arrive at good phrasing. “It is pitiful to see, or hear, a singer trying to fire his singing with imagination and life, trying to vary his tone according to the mood of the poem, while the accompanist sits at the piano like a tired old horse.”

Wells says almost the same: “The piano becomes another singer. The accompanist must be able to project the psychology of the text as much as the singer does.” Most piano students “have blinders on,” he says. “They should listen to string players, singers, instrumentalists, opera, chamber music, to get the idea of phrasing.”

I met Wells one afternoon after a visit to the South Pasadena Library. The house of violin maker-pianist-composer Richard Blois’ is right across the street (I always expect to spend 20 minutes there but never leave in less than two hours). Wells was playing the accompaniment to a group of art songs that Blois had composed, Blois whistling the soprano line. Then I sang some of my songs, which is neither here nor there, but it is nice to hear someone like Wells call them “haunting.” I am more of a baritone than a soprano but, feeling impresario-like, brought over my mezzo-soprano friend Bernice Brightbill. Everyone likes everyone--sunny new musical horizons open.

Wells, in a pleasant bass, sometimes sings the soprano line with Bernice as they practice. He has a formal, almost forbidding aspect, like a priest of some ancient sect--which he is, being an ordained priest of the Church of the East, Syro-Chaldean (Nastorian). One is startled, not 1953439859accompanists.